June 08, 2015
That would appear to be the implication of his comment in a WSJ column that:
“Further, a recent study has shown that Germans and Americans spend the same amount of time working, but the proportion of taxable market time vs. nontaxable home work time is different. In other words, Germans work just as much, but more of their work is not captured in the taxable market.”
According to the OECD, the average work year for a German worker is just 77.6 percent as long as for a U.S. worker (1388 hours per year compared with 1788 hours per year). However their per capita income is more than 83 percent as high as in the United States.
If Germans are doing nontaxable home work then this would not be picked up in its official GDP data. If this nontaxable homework is on average at least 75 percent as productive as the taxable work that German’s perform, then a measure of GDP that included this work would show that Germany has a higher per capita income than the United States.
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